Blue Skies, Rising
by Tobu Ishi
Summary: --ashes are falling all around them like charred flakes of the sky, and he sees the tears on her cheeks and thinks, stricken, This is it. Sokka/Yue, written for the 1sentence challenge.


**Blue Skies, Rising**  
_she ebbs and flows: fifty themes for sokka/yue_

-o-

Note - These sentences were written for the Fifty Sentence challenge at "1sentence dot livejournal dot com", using the Beta theme set.  
They can be viewed at the original community under the Avatar tag.

-o-  
**  
#01 - Walking**  
Up on the bridge railing like that, placing one boot casually in front of the other with a showoff grin on his face--she has to tilt her head back to look at him against the blue of the sky, and she hopes uneasily that he won't fall into the canal again from this height--and then realizes with a sudden smile why he is doing this in the first place.

**#02 - Waltz**  
It might be partly the trailing robes, but as far as he's concerned, she doesn't move--she glides.

**#03 - Wishes**  
Pressing her mittened hands together, she looks up at the moon and imagines in its light a tumble of snowy-haired daughters and ponytailed sons, and prays.

**#04 - Wonder**  
He gawks unabashedly at the marvels of her home, staring this way and that until she stares too, seeing it all as if it was built yesterday.

**#05 - Worry**  
He's smiling at her again, wide and warm and tender, and her fingers stray nervously to the fur at her neck, tugging it higher.

**#06 - Whimsy**  
"Where are you off to at this hour of night?" one of her ladies asks sleepily, and she answers gaily over her shoulder as she slips out the door, "A place...for an activity!"

**#07 - Waste/Wasteland**  
Desolation overwhelms that playful smile, as it cracks and falls apart, his eyes shocked and wounded--she has killed something precious, and she turns and flees like the murderer she is.

**#08 - Whiskey and rum**  
He's seen the men of his tribe drunk at ceremonies, numbed until they can run barefoot across the ice; now for the first time he longs to try it himself.

**#09 - War**  
Looking up from sharpening his machete, he narrows his eyes at Hahn, not caring if the bastard sees; if he wants to start something, it'll just make up for the tragic impossibility of killing someone with a look.

**#10 - Weddings**  
You aren't, she thinks miserably, supposed to weep at them when they're your own.

**#11 - Birthday**  
Half a moon ago, they made shy overtures over plates of steamed whale-crab in the soft midnight shadows; now she wills time to stop, ignoring its flow as hard as she can, as if her next birthday would never come.

**#12 - Blessings**  
There are small moments of peace, wandering the sparkling city and basking in each other more than in the chilly arctic sun, in which the rest of the world--even her father, even his sister, even the Avatar himself--simply ceases to exist for them.

**#13 - Bias**  
"It's not _strange!"_ he exclaims hotly, but manages not to blurt out in front of the entire room his newborn conviction that moon-white is the most perfect shade any girl's hair ever wore.

**#14 - Burning**  
Some days the anger and frustration swells up in her so fiercely that she can barely keep herself from ripping the ribbon from her neck and flinging it into the fire.

**#15 - Breathing**  
The warriors of his tribe used to talk about different kinds of deaths, around the council fire after dinner when they were full of red meat and braggadocio, and after the first few days spent trying fruitlessly to look into her eyes, he wants to go back and tell them that they were wrong--drowning is _not_ painless.

**#16 - Breaking**  
He talks constant trivialities to bleed off the need for more serious conversation, endlessly joking and asking and explaining, and it scares her because she doesn't know how much longer she can keep watching his lips move without grabbing him and kissing him silent.

**#17 - Belief**  
This is her martyrdom and she swallows it whole without flinching: to be born for her people, to live for her people, to die for her people, and to never love for her own sake.

**#18 - Balloon**  
He knows she isn't his and never really will be, but despite the intermittent moments of sharp sorrow it only takes a word and a soft look from her and he is a bright bubble in the air, he's flying, he's hearing light and seeing music and he is _gone_.

**#19 - Balcony**  
"Good night," she says, pushing him gently towards the door, and when he catches her hand and tugs off the mitten to share the warmth of their fingers she says it again, "Good night, good _night,"_ a thousand times helplessly under the stars.

**#20 - Bane**  
Hahn doesn't try to kiss her anymore, not since the bitterly frozen look she gave him the last time he pawed at her; this saves her from the temptation to bite him, or worse, to imagine someone else's lips where his are.

**#21 - Quiet**  
The chief sits on one side of the fire, and his daughter sits silently on the other, with her head bowed to hide eyes swollen from weeping, and never in his life has he wanted more to cast aside the laws it is his duty to uphold.

**#22 - Quirks**  
What with her being a princess and all, he assumes it's his responsibility to teach her the practical skills in life, like packing chunks of ice into snowballs to make them fly farther; she catches on with alarming speed, and then gives him a mischievous look and drags him to the bridge to show him how to spit sea prune pits all the way across the canal, and he is speechless.

**#23 - Question**  
"Do you love him?" he asks her, hoarse and hesitant, and when she bites her lip and shakes her head, he forces himself to bear down on all the other questions that want to follow, and simply be grateful for small mercies.

**#24 - Quarrel**  
As soon as she pulls her hand away from his, he turns back to look at her--ashes are falling all around them like charred flakes of the sky, and he sees the tears on her cheeks and thinks, stricken, _This is it._

**#25 - Quitting**  
"It's better this way," she says, and runs, as usual, before she can see the raw grief and frustration open up again in his eyes; her eternal shame will be that she was always too weak to face the wounds she inflicted on him.

**#26 - Jump**  
As the ceremonial marks are drawn on his brow, he imagines his father's weary sigh; he never did think twice when an idea occurred to him, always straight in with both feet, but this is all he can give her anymore and he won't hold back.

**#27 - Jester**  
He used to laugh, he used to make _her_ laugh...there was joy in his eyes and his smile and her heart brimmed with it, and now he turns away from her gaze like a broken man and her heart is empty.

**#28 - Jousting**  
Another girl, in another place, might have been pleased to have two young men fighting over her.

**#29 - Jewel**  
Staring at her reflection in the water below, she fingers the cold pendant at her throat and wonders where Sokka's carving is lying now.

**#30 - Just**  
"He's just a hick from the south, anyway," Hahn says with a broad merciless grin, and she curls her fingers into fists, arms held frozen stiff at her sides to keep from slapping him.

**#31 - Smirk**  
It's got to be all in the motivation, she decides finally, because how else can two lopsided smiles be so different?

**#32 - Sorrow**  
Staring at the ceiling in the dark, Katara simmers uncomfortably in the awareness that her brother is crying himself to sleep again; she recognizes the badly muffled hitching sounds, as he stubbornly tries to smother them in his pillow--it was the same just after their father left--but wisely keeps her mouth shut.

**#33 - Stupidity**  
"Admiral _Zhao!"_ he shouts for the fifth time, burning with fury and disgust on Yue's behalf--how will she be able to _live _with this ass?

**#34 - Serenade**  
In the midst of the bustle of young men rushing off to war, kissing their betrotheds goodbye, Hahn corners her in a side corridor for his own farewell, broad shoulders bullying her against the wall with his fingers squeezing her chin as he forces her to look up at him--"You're mine, not his," he says, with his eyes bearing down on her like cold, proud chips of ice, "remember that...!"--and she slumps against the wall when he is gone, and cries for the love songs he never gave her.

**#35 - Sarcasm**  
"That...shouldn't be too hard," he says in a sort of giddy shellshock, giving the chief his best attempt at a cocksure grin while his insides roil--_Yue, Princess Yue, twenty-four seven with me in charge, this is going to be heaven...this is going to be agony._

**#36 - Sordid**  
Waking warm and breathless with sweat on her face and his name on her lips, she feels--not embarrassed by the dream, somehow, but uplifted, freer than she was; even after she's married, she realizes, nobody will be able to take this away from her.

**#37 - Soliloquy**  
She remembers the ancient tale of Tui and La and the birth of the tides; how the jealous Koh cursed their love, the long time of separation, and the night of the solstice moon when they learned to reach for one another and were reunited; so she spends one long warm night curled on the grass in the temple of the Spirit Oasis, telling her own tale to the circling koi, and somehow she feels they understand.

**#38 - Sojourn**  
If being grateful he is here in the walled snow-city, quietly watching her eat her dinner, rather than out on the tossing waves with the rest of the warriors, is cowardly and selfish--then, for once in his life, Sokka can't object to being either.

**#39 - Share**  
"Well, maybe you could marry both of them," Aang jokes, in a well-meant attempt to find humor in the situation, and Yue splutters with giggles through her tears at the utter absurdity of Hahn agreeing to share anything with anyone.

**#40 - Solitary**  
When he isn't with her, which is rare these days, he tends towards sitting in empty corners, sharpening his machete or staring at nothing with a look on his face that makes Aang and Katara exchange small worried glances.

**#41 - Nowhere**  
He imagines lifting her onto Appa's back and soaring away to somewhere no angry father or jilted fiance could find them, the Earth Kingdom or a remote corner of the Fire Nation or even his own remnant of a tribe in the south; she knows there is not a place in all four nations where they could hide from her own broken honor.

**#42 - Neutral**  
She doesn't know the young man sprawled unconscious and bleeding in the snow, other than that he is some sort of enemy, and so it doesn't feel right to speak up for or against him; but when the Avatar himself goes to lift him out of the banks of ice and carries him back to the sky bison on his own back, it answers any questions she might have harbored about why Sokka follows this little boy.

**#43 - Nuance**  
He has taken her father's charge seriously, and over the last few days he has learned to notice her every breath; but though he hears it instantly despite the distracting sight of blood slithering over the midnight moon, he has no idea what that sudden shudder and gasp is going to mean in the end.

**#44 - Near**  
The sky is clotted with ashes, her people are fighting for their lives in the wreck of their shining city, the moon is bleeding out into a gory sky--her heart mourns for it all, but Sokka is there with her and she is not afraid.

**#45 - Natural**  
Somehow the story of her birth is the key to her life, the last proof he needed to believe in her as something perfect and true and eternal; what mortal girl actually wears the moonlight in her hair?

**#46 - Horizon**  
They witness the death of the moon above an ocean of malevolent red, clinging to each other for warmth as the world goes black.

**#47 - Valiant**  
He grips her hand, refusing to let go, until she pulls away: this is his last gift to her, that he would have protected her to the last, if only she had let him.

**#48 - Virtuous**  
She is graceful in her final steps, composed and proud as she greets her fate--and he will always remember her like this, with her eyes like pools of serene blue light in the darkness, so pure that his heart aches to look at her.

**#49 - Victor**  
She expected it to hurt, but instead there is warmth and brightness and a sense of welcome, buoying her up swiftly into the night air with light shedding from her in silvery flakes, and she is going someplace that feels like home-at-last and she is _free_...a collective murmur of wonder rises to the sky from all over the city, as the moon flickers back into being like a lantern newly lit.

**#50 - Defeat**  
The rays that touch his uplifted face are as cool as ocean water, as gentle as her kiss, as heavy as the lifeless bundle of her body in his arms; and for the first time and forever after, it is he who cannot face her gaze, and turns away.

-o-


End file.
